Comments by "Anthony Flack" (@AnthonyFlack) on "Technology Connections" channel.

  1. It's not that the complexity is all that great, it's that we're used to seeing these same tasks performed by tiny solid-state electronics and crystal oscillators, not relays and spinning cams. The innards of this pinball machine resemble the inner workings of a simple microchip, laid out as a human-scale contraption. You can see how it was that we were able to bootstrap ourselves from mechanical engineering to computer science, and how Ada Lovelace could conceive the first computer programs a century before the first computers.
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  2. It makes sense; if freeze-dried food was so great we'd be buying everything freeze-dried.
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  3. Good old days playing electronic games with a brightly-glowing VFD and burning through a fistful of C size batteries in an afternoon. Alongside LCD games that were useless in the dark, but ran continuously for six months on a couple of watch batteries. The Nintendo Game & Watch Panorama series and the Tomytronic 3D games were both fantastically ingenious uses of an unlit LCD display.
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  4. I enjoyed the triples. Your dry sense of humour is appreciated. My hair seems to have gone that way lately too. Not quite sure where I'm taking it.
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  5. Perhaps if you were to make a rig that held all of the lights at once, with a moveable mask that covers 3/4 of them at a time, that would save time and tangles.
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